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Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
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Midnight's Children (1981)

by Salman Rushdie

Other authors: See the other authors section.

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingConversations / Mentions
8,712143323 (4.09)1 / 608
  1. 51
    The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (GoST)
  2. 40
    One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (Nickelini)
  3. 21
    The Tin Drum by Günter Grass (GabrielF, CGlanovsky)
    GabrielF: I think Rushdie based a lot of his style in Midnight's Children on The Tin Drum. Both books are historical epics told through the perspective of a child with strange powers.
    CGlanovsky: A boy bound to the destiny of his birthplace. Surreal elements.
  4. 21
    The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (BGP)
  5. 11
    The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie (wrmjr66)
    wrmjr66: I think The Moor's Last Sigh is Rushdie's best book since Midnight's Children.
  6. 00
    My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk (BGP)
  7. 00
    Kim by Rudyard Kipling (Gregorio_Roth)
    Gregorio_Roth: The book is a modern interpretation of KIM in a number of ways. I think it will complete your point of view on Imperialism and India.
  8. 00
    The Master and Margarita by Mikhaíl Bulgakov (BGP)
  9. 02
    The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (amyblue)
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English (133)  Spanish (2)  French (2)  Dutch (1)  Danish (1)  Polish (1)  Finnish (1)  Czech (1)  All languages (142)
Showing 1-5 of 133 (next | show all)
I am disappointed not to have been able to finish this, the first Booker Prize winner I haven't loved. I plugged along to about page 150 but was finding the reading experience so annoying and unpleasant that I had to give up.

Part of the problem, possibly a large part, is that I don't enjoy allegorical fiction where the plot and personalities pretty much serve only to support the allegory. Midnight's Children is not just an allegory, it is an intensely complicated one into the bargain. Six hundred and some pages of that is not something I'm prepared to endure. The lead character keeps saying that to know him you have to know the whole world, but, despite my recognising the quality of the writing and appreciating some of the humour and imagery, the world presented has not grabbed me.

I have changed to a David Malouf novel and am a much, much happier reader as a result. ( )
  Vivl | May 6, 2013 |
You can read my review of Midnight's Children over at my blog (contains some spoilers): http://www.rulethewaves.net/blog/?p=2098 ( )
  caffeinatedlife | Apr 26, 2013 |
I was not even halfway through when i gave up reading this novel.I got really fed up, annoyed and lost all my patience.This doesn't mean the novel was very bad it was because Salman Rusdie's way of writing was very high(????) that i had to read it twice to understand the characters and the story beneath it.I gave 5 stars for his unique way of writing because he has made it sure that the readers doesn't know what they were really reading.It was a surprise to me why this novel got Booker-prize award.The enthusiasm that was there before reading the book was totally spoiled after reading. ( )
  MaryJudeAnton | Apr 18, 2013 |
Why nobody else but me should pay attention to my rating or review, and should just ignore everything I say:

I’m reviewing this and “finished” this book only because I do that for all my real world book club books. I cheated. If I had a did not finish or abandoned shelf, I’d have used it, and not poorly plowed my way through the book. I speed read the book and I’m not a champion speed reader, so I wasn’t being fair to the book and cannot do it justice when talking about it. I missed a lot, including some whats and hows and whys. I was not in the mood to read it. I think it’s possible if I hadn’t felt rushed to read it and had been in the mood for it, I might have appreciated it more. It’s likely I’ll never get back to it though, but writing these review notes are to remind me about it and to help me to decide whether to reread it sometime in the future. I don’t feel guilty about improperly skewing the book’s Goodreads’ stats because it has so many ratings and reviews. It’s not this book’s fault that I was overwhelmed and frazzled and had a pile of books I would have preferred to read. The book never drew me in; I just wanted it to be over.

The bad:

I stayed up late to finish it, not because I couldn’t put it down but because I wanted to put it down for good.

I have liked magical realism in some books but it’s never been a favorite sub-genre of mine. Here, for me it took away from the story. I’d have rather had a straight story novel, or even a non-fiction book about India’s history and independence.

I didn’t care about or get attached to the characters, and the narrator drove me crazy with his way of storytelling.

I printed out a character list to help me keep things straight, but found it wasn’t at all comprehensive and I looked at it only several times.

While some of the language was lovely, I didn’t like the way the story was told.

I love “twin” stories and switched at birth stories, but not this one, although for me, for a bit of time, the book got more interesting when the children finally got to age ten. When the narrator discovered them and they discovered each other, fairly interesting. But, the whole book was a slow crawl, filled with digressions, some of which I found superfluous.

This book, partly because of a narrator talking about times as though there when not during his lifetime, reminded me of some other books I’ve read with my book club, including Middlesex and Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and I think some others whose titles are now escaping me, but all books I enjoyed more, except for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, another rare one of our books I haven’t enjoyed, and the only other of our books I “skipped through” as rapidly as I could, and another one that had me amazed I didn’t love it.

The good:

This is the Booker winner of all the Booker Prize winners, and I have other winners on my shelf I really want to read.

It has many, many beautifully written passages.

My edition has an introduction to the 25th anniversary edition by the author, and he gives some background on what’s real, what’s fictionalized, how the book was received by people in the west vs. India, and by Indira Ghandi; all that was interesting information.

It’s brilliantly ambitious.

So, in summary: This book was not my cup of tea but I think it might have been me, me at the time I was reading it. ( )
1 vote Lisa2013 | Apr 17, 2013 |
Some books have no easy comp titles; this book reminded me of several other books (namely, Like Water for Chocolate, 100 Years of Solitude, and The God of Small Things, the last of which, incidentally, also won the Booker Prize, in 1997). Definitely elements of magical realism; not only a unique story, but a unique way of telling it as well. Quite a book. ( )
  JennyArch | Apr 3, 2013 |
Showing 1-5 of 133 (next | show all)
Midnight's Children is a teeming fable of postcolonial India, told in magical-realist fashion by a telepathic hero born at the stroke of midnight on the day the country became independent. First published in 1981, it was met with little immediate excitement.
added by mikeg2 | editThe Guardian, Lindesay Irvine (Jul 10, 2008)
 
"The literary map of India is about to be redrawn. . . . What [English-language fiction about India] has been missing is . . . something just a little coarse, a hunger to swallow India whole and spit it out. . . . Now, in 'Midnight's Children,' Salman Rushdie has realized that ambition."
added by GYKM | editNew York Times, Clarke Blaise (Apr 19, 1981)
 

» Add other authors (52 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Salman Rushdieprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Howard, IanCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
Dedication
For Zafar Rushdie
who, contrary to all expectations,
was born in the afternoon.
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I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time.
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Please distinguish among:

-- Salman Rushdie's original 1981 novel, Midnight's Children;

-- Rushdie's 1999 screenplay adaptation (with introduction) of the novel, having the same title; and

-- The 2003 stage play, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, adapted for theater by Rushdie, Tim Supple and Simon Reade.

Thank you.
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Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0812976533, Paperback)

Anyone who has spent time in the developing world will know that one of Bombay's claims to fame is the enormous film industry that churns out hundreds of musical fantasies each year. The other, of course, is native son Salman Rushdie--less prolific, perhaps than Bollywood, but in his own way just as fantastical. Though Rushdie's novels lack the requisite six musical numbers that punctuate every Bombay talkie, they often share basic plot points with their cinematic counterparts. Take, for example, his 1980 Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children: two children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment at which India became an independent nation--are switched in the hospital. The infant scion of a wealthy Muslim family is sent to be raised in a Hindu tenement, while the legitimate heir to such squalor ends up establishing squatters' rights to his unlucky hospital mate's luxurious bassinet. Switched babies are standard fare for a Hindi film, and one can't help but feel that Rushdie's world-view--and certainly his sense of the fantastical--has been shaped by the films of his childhood. But whereas the movies, while entertaining, are markedly mediocre, Midnight's Children is a masterpiece, brilliant written, wildly unpredictable, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.

Rushdie's narrator, Saleem Sinai, is the Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims. Near the beginning of the novel, he informs us that he is falling apart--literally:

I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug--that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of an acceleration.
In light of this unfortunate physical degeneration, Saleem has decided to write his life story, and, incidentally, that of India's, before he crumbles into "(approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust." It seems that within one hour of midnight on India's independence day, 1,001 children were born. All of those children were endowed with special powers: some can travel through time, for example; one can change gender. Saleem's gift is telepathy, and it is via this power that he discovers the truth of his birth: that he is, in fact, the product of the illicit coupling of an Indian mother and an English father, and has usurped another's place. His gift also reveals the identities of all the other children and the fact that it is in his power to gather them for a "midnight parliament" to save the nation. To do so, however, would lay him open to that other child, christened Shiva, who has grown up to be a brutish killer. Saleem's dilemma plays out against the backdrop of the first years of independence: the partition of India and Pakistan, the ascendancy of "The Widow" Indira Gandhi, war, and, eventually, the imposition of martial law.

We've seen this mix of magical thinking and political reality before in the works of Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. What sets Rushdie apart is his mad prose pyrotechnics, the exuberant acrobatics of rhyme and alliteration, pun, wordplay, proper and "Babu" English chasing each other across the page in a dizzying, exhilarating cataract of words. Rushdie can be laugh-out-loud funny, but make no mistake--this is an angry book, and its author's outrage lends his language wings. Midnight's Children is Salman Rushdie's irate, affectionate love song to his native land--not so different from a Bombay talkie, after all. --Alix Wilber

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:49:58 -0500)

(see all 7 descriptions)

The life of a man born at the moment of India's independence becomes inextricably linked to that of his nation and is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirror modern India's course, in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the Booker Prize-winning novel.… (more)

» see all 6 descriptions

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